Aly Hotz has been volunteering with FFEN for 2 ½ years but has been working with FFEN’s Strategic Food Sourcing Analysis report data for much longer.
Hotz first connected with FFEN in her role as a Second Harvest Heartland employee where she worked directly with food shelves processing their orders with the food bank. In that position, she was one of the people at the food bank who provided FFEN with ordering data from participating food shelves in the region who had signed a data release. Then, she connected with the mission of FFEN on a more personal level and signed up as a skilled volunteer on the data analysis team. As FFEN has evolved, so has Hotz’s role. She currently ensures that the data used to generate food sourcing reports is clean, accurate, and ready for report creation.
“It’s interesting to see how much thought goes into those orders and what food shelves and the folks working there are able to take from those reports,” Hotz said.
Hotz said as a volunteer she’s intrigued to see the back end of the process. FFEN assigned her data to work within the Second Harvest Heartland region to keep data from other food banks private. She has since moved to the Kitchen Coalition program within the food bank and develops partner relationships for the program which provides prepared meals.
“It’s really interesting to see how food shelves are looking at this data year over year to make changes and set priorities,” she said. “I’m impressed with how much insight it’s able to give folks and allows them to see things in a different way and understand ordering patterns over a long period of time.”
Additionally, Hotz said it’s been eye-opening to see how many partners there are in the hunger relief system.
“It’s another layer of the hunger relief network and I’m able to see that through volunteering with FFEN,” she said. “It’s great to see how many organizations and different people are involved and want to make a difference.”
